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Conference tournaments are about basketball but also so much more: the parents, fans, bands, cheerleaders, etc. The A-10 Tournament will be taking place next week in Washington, DC, and we could not be more excited to be there in person! HoopsHD is covering all the angles so you can look forward to an abundance of access in the week ahead. Jon Teitel commences our coverage from DC with an interview of Dayton basketball mother Anna Jack about her son Isaac.
You were born/raised in Canada: how big was basketball up north when you were growing up, and how big is it now? It was always around but was not the #1 sport: I did not start playing until the 7th grade in a little city league. I live on Vancouver Island in a town of 20,000 people: if I had lived in Vancouver (with a population of more than 700,000) then it might have been different. The sport has grown a lot but is still not big where I am: the bigger cities have more basketball.
In addition to playing basketball, you were quite the track star as a teenager (Canadian Summer Games champ/Canadian Junior National champ/5th place in the Pan American Championships): what made you choose BYU? I grew up Mormon but was not a practicing Mormon by the time I went there. BYU is a sport-oriented school, and I went there to play basketball, but it was not my favorite sport.
You won NCAA championships in the discus in 1991/1992, becoming the first Canadian thrower to ever win an NCAA competition: what did it mean to you to win a pair of titles? It was great to win but I did not even know how big a deal it was at the time. It is not the same as if we had won a basketball/football title.
In 1994 you graduated with a bachelor’s degree in physical education: what have you been up to for the past 3 decades? I am a teacher/coach at my old high school where I grew up. I did not think I would come back here…but here I am!
I incorrectly assumed that all very tall people have been playing basketball their entire lives, but your son Isaac started out doing hockey/snowboarding/soccer: how did he eventually make the switch to hoops in 2020? There was not a lot of soccer, but he played everything. I made him do track, which as a core sport I figured could only help. After his 10th grade hockey season his feet were so big that we would have had to buy him custom skates (which probably would have cost $1000!). He started playing basketball around 8th grade as he began getting taller and liked it. I remember when he was at a basketball camp in Bellingham, WA: he called me to say that he broke his leg, so we raced over there, took him home for emergency surgery, and he was only able to get back onto the court toward the end of his 11th grade season. In 12th grade he was healthier…but did not play much since that was when COVID happened. He played with Shaedon Sharpe on the EYBL team UPLAY, and went to prep school/played at Fort Erie with Leonard Miller. He would fly all over the US to play basketball.
In 2022 he scored 8 PTS in the All-Canadian BioSteel Basketball Game: how big a deal was it for him to make Canada’s version of the McDonalds All-American Game? It was huge. He went to prep school where they won the biggest basketball league in Canada and then got selected to the BioSteel Game. It was a big honor: those players/coaches still look after him because he is hooked into some very amazing people.
He began his college career at Buffalo: why did he decide to transfer in 2023, and what made him choose Dayton? He had a great year at Buffalo…but then they fired all the coaches. They told him that if the portal did not work out then they still wanted him back, so he figured he had nothing to lose by looking around. He had recruiting trips scheduled for several schools including Vanderbilt/Clemson/Dayton. After he went to Dayton, he called me right away and said he wanted to go there because it felt like a family.
Some of his 1st nicknames were “Puff” and “Bambi”, and now his teammates call him “Maniac”: who came up with any of these, and does he like any of them? His older brother gave him the name “Puff” from a cartoon, and his hockey teammates called him “Bambi” because of the way that he looked on skates while standing so tall. “Maniac” came from DaRon Holmes II after Isaac ordered a “Caniac Combo” at Raising Cane’s. He does not mind any of the nicknames because he does not get rattled by anything.
In the 2024 NCAA tourney the Flyers beat Nevada before losing to Arizona: what are your memories of that wild week? My husband went to the games while I was with a group of students at Portugal. It was unbelievable: all their games are nail-biters and they are hard on my heart. I was mad that I could not be there because the games were in my old stomping grounds of Utah.
Your son has only played 18 games this season but when he has been in the lineup the team has done well (beating St. Joe’s/UConn and losing by single-digits to Cincinnati/Iowa State/North Carolina): do you think he will play in the A-10 tourney, and how far do you think Dayton will go? I have no idea whether he will play: you never know. Same with Dayton: you never know. They play at VCU tonight and could win: they definitely have the potential. We went to Maui last November and it was unbelievable: I cannot wait to go back to Hawaii. They lost to UNC by 2 PTS but seeing the amount of Flyer fans who travel was incredible. They lost to Iowa State by 5 but we got to see Isaac’s former Buffalo teammate Curtis Jones, who is such a nice guy. Then we beat UConn, which was fantastic. We went to see the Flyers play in a tournament in Charleston the previous November and there were more fans from Dayton than anywhere else!
